Neutralising the performance paradox - by gender

We're brought up to believe that hard work pays off. Put in the hours and success follows. It feels right and fits all the superficial workplace conventions. The problem is that for many people it's just not true.

If you're a woman, or a man with a particular combination of personality traits, there's a strong possibility that even though everyone thinks you’re good at your job you're still in the same role you were five years ago on roughly the same salary. If that's what you want then there's nothing wrong at all, but if it's not what you want, the disconnect between your performance and your career development is likely to create intense frustration, or worse.

Performance v Potential

Two Ps are at work here: performance is always (visibly or not) in the balance with potential. And potential consistently outweighs performance.

While working with women and men on developing behaviours that signal potential one thing has stood out. Each gender faces a different initial barrier: one largely self created and the other resulting from external forces. Each requires a different response.

First though...

What is potential?

Are you a High Potential? (Ready, Conger, Hill 2010) surveyed 45 companies worldwide to establish what employers (whether they’re transparent about it or not, and often they’re not) looked for when evaluating potential. Three essentials were identified:

• performance (no one said performance doesn’t matter at all, despite the occasional example of someone elegantly ascending the corporate hierarchy unaccompanied by noticeable impact)

• the ability to learn new expertise

• recognising that behaviour counts.

The authors also found four intangible and often unacknowledged “x factors” that really shout potential:

• A drive to excel (performance, but with the dial turned up and, crucially, not limited to role metrics)

• A catalytic learning capability (learning with immediate, positive application)

• An enterprising spirit (sniffing out opportunities everywhere, all the time…mainly for yourself)

• Dynamic sensors (if you’re doing a lot of the first three, you’re walking a fine line between success and failure…the dynamic sensors allow you to quickly identify risk and reroute, even at the last moment)

The parentheses are mine and other interpretations of potential are certainly available, but however you define it, potential trumps performance. As the authors said: “You’re doing everything right. You’re delivering value and early results. But high-potential status remains elusive.”

Knowing yourself

Where do you start? If you’re a man, there’s a good chance that your high performance is obscuring your view of who you are at work. Effectively, you have become your performance and little else. The metrics are in your favour, you get results, so why are other people overtaking you? Luck, favouritism, right place right time?

Maybe, but more likely you are not recognising your own character traits, the ones that are limiting your ability to display the behaviours that make up the x factors found in the survey. Possibly they’re stopping you even realising such factors exist or that potential is the main measure on which people are evaluated. Put simply, you don't know the rules of the game. Some people are unaware the game even exists.

Recognising the relationship between potential (and how it’s displayed) and your character traits is the mandatory first step. Books, online tests, YouTube, coaching, LinkedIn, mentoring…whatever your preference, it needs to be done before you can start working on the behaviours themselves. That is if you want to work on them: it can't be said too often that high performance is an achievement in itself.

But if you do want to work on them “it might be worth taking personality into account...in order to stimulate employee behavioural patterns that are known for their positive effects on career success.” (Personality Traits and Types in Relation to Career Success).

Unsurprisingly, I’d go further than “it might”. It must. It must because a successful career history based on who you are and how you do things is just history. Worse, it's a positive history that conditions you to continue doing what you've always done.

It's different for women

If you are a woman though (any woman, any personality, any character type), things are different (it's a novel idea I know, but bear with me). Look at these two studies: Overlooked Leadership Potential, Centre for the Study of Group Processes 2019 and Potential and the Gender Promotion Gap, Benson, Li, Shue, 2022. Both focus on the role of gender in the evaluation of potential and neither makes for comfortable reading. But look at them you should, if only to know where your real starting point is.

As both the studies show, there is clear, external bias at work. Most men get evaluated on potential and most women on performance, and potential outweighs performance.

What's the answer?

While there’s a clear answer to the challenges facing men with particular personality types, what should women do? If you search for ‘how do women become high-potential employees’ (or variants) you’re likely to see a first page of suggestions (some very old) about how organisations can improve their career ladders or empower their workforces. I got a bit bored of looking for the one that simply said employers should stop associating potential with men and performance with women. I’m sure it’s there somewhere. Maybe. (For balance, Benson et al did propose similar counterfactuals with potential positive outcomes.)

Real world advice (passed on to me by women who’ve been the lucky recipients) is usually both simplistic and unequivocal (never a good combination): “Be more confident!” “Be more proactive!” “Be more resilient!” “Show more ambition!” I’ve coached confident, proactive, ambitious women who had all still faced the same challenges.

A more visionary variant is to wait until a greater proportion of women occupy senior roles in these organisations. I have two concerns with this approach. First, at current rates that will be a very long wait. Secondly, both studies showed that when women are doing the evaluation, their actions are broadly similar to those of men when evaluating potential. While individual gender bias is, of course, a significant issue it does appear that uniform behaviour is being created by organisation-level culture.

What's the real answer?

Every piece of research, every #womenin group, every event or post on the subject adds a little pressure towards change, but who knows how long that will take. In the meantime, what to do?

I’d really like to propose an exciting, ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ first step, but I can’t because what’s needed is basic and a little bit dull. Not only do women generally not get evaluated on potential, they’re also more than likely to put 100 per cent of themselves into their performance (especially if they are managing teams). Stop.

Probably due to nurture (it might be a cliche, but there really is no female equivalent of 'boys will be boys') many women prioritise team management, role objectives and generalised organisational 'good' over self, career development and the display of potential.

Even the confident, ambitious women I've worked with are often surprised when asked to break down how they really spend their time at work. Surprised at how little (frequently none) is spent on themselves. And 'themselves' here means the development and implementation of the behaviours that signal potential.

For many people, not putting 100 per cent against performance is an unsettling idea. And what's the point of unsettling yourself if studies show that women don't get evaluated on potential anyway?

The gaps between research and real world

There’s no way of avoiding the negative overall conclusions of the studies and you really do need to be aware of them because they form your starting point, but there are findings within them which should stop you from thinking you’re always going to run into a brick wall. In Potential and the Gender Promotion Gap for example, women do get promoted by showing potential (not as often as men of course) and not only that but their potential is proved to be fully realised by their performance ratings in their new roles.

Unlike that study (which looked at several years’ worth of data relating to promotions in a single company) the other consisted of a pair of experiments using a model based on responses to different candidates’ applications to an imagined job at an imaginary company. The results are fascinating and very valuable (to more than just the issues discussed here) but they are not based on high-performance women in role and wanting to move up within their real, current organisations.

Both studies highlight the obstacles women face, but they’re not impregnable. They’re not impregnable if you take the first step, which is to move away from concentrating on performance to the exclusion of everything else.

Different genders...different first steps

The starting point for men is really knowing their own personality traits because there's a good chance that their high level of performance gives them a false sense of themselves. For women, it's a completely different starting point: high performance doesn't give them a false sense of themselves, it gives them a false sense of how they are seen by their organisations.

If you’re a man whose personality type stops you showing potential, start by recognising who you are. If you're a woman, then start by taking time away from performance and giving it back to yourself.

These are starting points only. They say nothing about the subsequent work and behavioural changes needed to achieve high-potential recognition other than if they're not addressed, that work is likely to result only in transient benefits or no benefit at all.